Colin Grey, whose 14-year-old son is charged with murdering two college students and two academics at a Georgia highschool final month, himself faces 29 criminal charges that might ship him to jail for the remainder of his life. The case is a part of a troubling development through which prosecutors search to unfold the blame for varsity shootings by criminalizing parental failures.
Judging from the allegations towards him, Grey is nobody’s concept of a mannequin father or mother. Prosecutors say he didn’t securely retailer the rifle used within the September 4 assault at Apalachee Excessive Faculty in Winder, a weapon he purchased his son, Colt, as a Christmas current.
Grey allegedly knew Colt was deeply troubled however didn’t get him the assistance he wanted. He allegedly disregarded indicators that Colt was vulnerable to violence, together with a photograph of a faculty shooter that {the teenager} had on his bed room wall.
If the Apalachee Excessive Faculty taking pictures had concerned a handgun, these claims might need supported a felony cost below a Georgia statute that applies to a father or mother who “furnish[es] a pistol or revolver to a minor” when he “is conscious of a considerable danger” that the minor “will use a pistol or revolver to commit a felony offense.” However as a result of that legislation doesn’t cowl rifles, prosecutors are counting on different statutes which might be much less clearly relevant.
An indictment unveiled final week charges Grey with two counts of second-degree homicide, every of which is punishable by 10 to 30 years in jail. That’s the most critical cost ever introduced towards a faculty shooter’s father or mother.
The homicide expenses are based mostly on a statute that applies to somebody who “causes the loss of life of one other human being regardless of malice” whereas committing “cruelty to youngsters within the second diploma.” The latter crime is defined as inflicting a minor to undergo “merciless or extreme bodily or psychological ache” with “prison negligence,” which in flip is defined as “an act or failure to behave which demonstrates a willful, wanton, or reckless disregard for the security of others who would possibly moderately be anticipated to be injured thereby.”
Grey additionally faces 20 counts of cruelty to youngsters, two counts of involuntary manslaughter, and 5 counts of reckless conduct. All the expenses straight or not directly depend on requirements that require greater than proof of inattentiveness or carelessness.
To convict Grey, prosecutors should persuade a jury that he ought to have identified his son was inclined to commit mass homicide and willfully, recklessly, or consciously disregarded that hazard. Though that beforehand would have appeared like a frightening problem, it appears to be like much less iffy in gentle of two verdicts that Michigan prosecutors obtained earlier this 12 months.
In separate trials, juries convicted Jennifer and James Crumbley, the dad and mom of a teen who killed 4 college students at Oxford Excessive Faculty in 2021, of involuntary manslaughter. They received jail sentences of 10 to fifteen years.
The allegations in that case had been just like the allegations towards Grey: that the couple ignored warning indicators and allowed their son unsupervised entry to the gun he used within the assault. The authorized normal additionally was related: Prosecutors needed to show that the defendants “willfully disregard[ed] the outcomes to others which may comply with from an act or failure to behave.”
It’s believable to argue that the dad and mom in these instances share ethical accountability for his or her youngsters’s crimes and must be held civilly liable. It’s far more of a stretch to argue that their failures amounted to prison negligence, not to mention homicide.
Warning indicators are at all times clear looking back, and folks wish to consider that youngsters bent on mass homicide may be thwarted if solely adults pay sufficient consideration, take “pink flags” critically, and intervene earlier than it’s too late. Nevertheless reassuring that perception could be, it doesn’t justify sending a father to jail for all times as a result of he by no means imagined his son able to such a horrifying crime.
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